


why must i love you in the dark?

by prettylittledarkstar



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/F, Femslash, Fluff and Angst, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Reylo - Freeform, Southern Gothic, female ben solo/kylo ren, lesbian farmers am i right ladies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-16 02:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14154264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettylittledarkstar/pseuds/prettylittledarkstar
Summary: Snapshots of a relationship born from the twisted vines of the Holy and the desire from the neglected.The devil is real, she calls me baby.





	why must i love you in the dark?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iamladyloki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamladyloki/gifts).



> for those of you who are unaware, i do a femslash friday on my tumblr where i indulge in writing femslash reylo all night because, honestly, why not??? i got a prompt from iamladyloki a while ago ('lesbian farmers') that i filled, but i wanted to try something different for it, to really, y'know, amp up its potential as a prompt. 
> 
> warning for general shitty southern gothic and the derailing of religious allusions, also warning: implications of child abuse and brief description of abuse
> 
> i put underage because parts of this deal with them going through childhood/adolescence and such and being in love, but there's no sex or anything like that.

_“Her heart is a black-blue like the feathers of the crows but softer than the fruit they scavenge.”_

 

_“Her eyes are bitter brown, like the acid dirt under my fingernails.”_

 

_“She cries when everyone watches, like summer storms interrupting work in the fields.”_

Just the stem was left. Church swing set, mop of black hair and shiny shoes, Sunday best in red velvet and pearls. The older, charismatic, and more popular Poe Dameron had grabbed it from the Governor’s daughter’s pale hands and ripped every petal off while his honey eyes shined. Mother always said Poe was like the son she never had, and maybe one day he’d become the son-in-law she’d always dreamt of.

  
“My rose!“ the girl had cried, and though she was taller than most girls, Poe was too tall and strong and mocking to be beaten. The other kids had crowded around to see what the big fuss was. They all watched as Poe plucked petals off the white rose she’d been given after staring longingly at it in its vase at the altar all morning. Its soft layers floated to the ground where he dropped them and Bel watched in devastation as all her plans to press the flower were shattered. “Stop it! Jesus won’t like what you’ve done!”

“Don’t you know that I’m mean because I like you?” He had winked then, and never did she want to remove someone’s tongue more than she did then.

“I’d rather rot than be with you, Dameron!” she had yelled, tears of frustration blinding her as she lunged at him and grabbed onto his shoulder to give herself leverage as he held the rose out of her reach. At her comment, he had snorted and backed away from her then, right before twisting the silken head like he was picking an apple.

He let the petals drop into a mess on the floor and Bel scrambled to her knees to salvage some of the pretty ones for her collection, but already they had been ruined by the dirt.

Fists curled up in the grass, eyes brimming, red velvet now smudged velvet. All the kids were watching with baited breath. And then a bell. No, a voice. A shout.

“Hey!” Angry. Through the ground she could feel the angry stomps approaching.

“Sand rat!” Poe beamed affectionately. He had a way of charming and demeaning every girl in town, and it was up to the girl in question to interpret it.

And.

Oh. It was Rey. The scrawny, scraped, and bruised girl who lived two farms down. Two years younger, two sizes smaller, with twice the fire of the sun.

Poe’s laugh turned to a grunt of panic as Bel heard the dull thud of a body smacking into the ground.

“Leave her alone!”

Bel looked up from the dirt and found chestnut buns falling loose as the tiny girl threw a punch at Poe Dameron’s perfect face.

————

  
After a lot of shouting and kicking, the playground cleared except for two young girls who sat with skinned knees and dirty rose petals. Rey reached over to grip the pale hand that worried at one of the petals.

“Please don’t be sad,” she said softly, her eyes wide with melancholy hope, “Where there’s kindness, there’s love. My parents told me that before they left me. And sometimes kindness is rough.”

 

_“She holds my hand behind the honeysuckle bushes and sings when my bloody fingers shake.”_

Sweet, heavy summer wind rustled the leaves and left the tall grass shuddering. 

Rey cried the most that hazy afternoon. 

Something about the Guardian. Something about confinement and starvation and Rey said she felt like Magdalene on the second day, like Jesus was there but otherwise occupied, like heaven could send down an angel and she’d shy from its touch.

The scrawny girl rocked back and forth with her knees to her chest, a dull ache in her gut and everywhere, unable to find solace in the sweet fingertips that rubbed against her back. 

The only one who ever understood neglect and mistreatment was a pair of honeyed eyes and a mess of hair darker than night. The one who didn’t make fun of her foreign accent, who didn’t call her a twig, who didn’t stare so hard at her dirty clothes. The one who was allowed to take showers every day and the one with clothes that could pay a year’s water bill. Not that any of those things ever got to her; it was just nice to have someone who didn’t hate her. 

“I’ll die on this farm before I’m sixteen,” she muttered, shuddering at the idea as a silent tear slipped down her cheek. Considering her living conditions, it was a very likely possibility. “I’ll never meet my parents.”

Bel shifted to sit behind Rey and sighed before wrapping her arms around her waist. Stretching out her long legs, she pressed her cheek into Rey’s back, right where she could hear her heart.

“You won’t die like that,” Bel said quietly, “I won’t let you.” She paused then, a small smile creeping to her face. “Where there’s kindness there’s love.”

Rey let out a sad little laugh that turned into a hiccup. The lazy breeze picked up again, carrying with it the scent of ripe honeysuckle. All was sad and quiet for a moment. Bel had taken to humming an old hymn as she listened to the breathing of her quiet crush.

“Daisy Rey!” A man’s voice that startled both the girls. Bel could feel the muscles in Rey’s back clench up tight, coiling like a cottonmouth.

“I’m fixin’ to whoop your ass if you don’t show your face in the next ten seconds,” bellowed the man, and she seemed to sink further into Bel’s embrace before ripping away abruptly and scrambling to her feet. She couldn’t see her face as she sprinted away towards the voice, but she watched the emaciated girl wipe her eyes with the back of her hand.

And so she clutched the jade cross that hung from her neck, heart racing.

_Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…_

 

_“Her darkness is a man under the warped lens of the Holy Spirit, and she says the blood will dry. Scars fade. Memory burns sharp behind her eyelids and I am afraid for her.”_

“Please, I can’t—"

A flash of wrinkled fingers on smooth skin and a loud crack, ringing through the emptiness of the Holy Place. Her dark hair fell in her eyes as she blinked back tears, willing that she hold in the soft whimper threatening to wrestle itself from her throat.

“Foolish child. If you want to learn the ways of God, you take knowledge from His mouthpiece. Never has a more worthy presence asked something so simple of you.”

Bel squeezed her eyes shut, her stomach turning. Shaky breath. Shaky hands.

She was only fourteen.

She was only a girl.

 

_“She sleeps with her windows locked and never quite makes it to her bed most nights. She calls me in her closet and cries through the phone. Her parents are yelling again, about her, about the skinny, freckled girl they see her with, about the ranch across the continent with space available. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have parents. I don’t have words. I don’t know and I’m running to her house because...I don’t know why.”_

“They’re sending me away,” she whispered through the phone, her voice a sliver of hard-pressed emotion and choked-back sobs. She was fifteen. Rey was thirteen and unwilling to lose what kept her afloat.

Sinking chest, heavier than the molten core of this earth, and she leapt out of her bed with feather toes and a worried lip. She could feel tears prick her eyes and a lump form in her throat.

“What?”

“They’re taking me next week,” she said weakly, then failed to stifle one of those loud coughing sobs.

No. _No_.

Rey shoved into her shoes and unlocked the window, her anxious fingers slipping on the cold sill as she pried it open.

“I’m coming over.” She swung her leg over the side. And then she hung up.

 

————

 

Rey had tapped on the third window on the left at the back of the Governor’s house, breathless as she stood on the balcony. Without a single word, the glass slid open and pale arms slipped around her shoulders as she climbed in. There was barely a sound except the soft way in which they sunk onto the bed and a muffled, heartbreaking cry from the younger. The darkness surrounded them yet still the moonlight crept in, illuminating soft tears and swollen eyes and messy hair and slim fingers clutched at the nape, weaved between wild night sky strands, begging to be closer, begging to never have to let go. Begging to _please just this once let things go my way_.

The girls sat in hushed chaos, listening to the fire-spitting fight that raged beneath the crystal chandelier of the dining room. Rey caught bits of “unpredictable” and pieces of “volatile” and squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could just disappear with Bel to a place without the stain of deception and feigned kindness.

“I love you,” she whispered, and did girls that age even know love? Did girls that age even know how to birth a calf or vaccinate the ewes? Did girls that age know that the betrayal of the Holy Word for flowery lust was foulest sin?

Bel mumbled an affirmative, her cheek pressed wetly into Rey’s freckled, bony shoulder. The black smudge of makeup running down her skin had bled onto Rey and she reached over to grab the luxe bedsheet and pulled it up to cover them both, to hide them from reality.

She shifted, her arm wrapping tighter around Rey’s stomach. “Please stay with me.”

And so many things could go wrong the next morning but at that moment Rey didn’t care. She just wanted to feel the love that radiated off of Bel. No one, no one no one no one but her ever held her like love, like desperation, like springtime and nighttime and summer storms. “Of course.”

 

_“She calls me in the rain, she calls me, she doesn’t, she can’t. I am alone and there is nothing happy about the summer storm or the blue-black crows or the late-night call or the honeysuckle bush. But I know how to wait.”_

“I promise, I’ll come back.” Whispered lies of promises never kept.

Rey was seventeen. Lived in a welded shack of scrap metal in the junkyard, starving, freezing, free. _She_ had been gone. Gone for years.

Shaking fingers on the splotchy blue lines and the pen shook but there was nothing she could do about it. “…and my heart aches for you, baby girl, it aches. i waited so long for things that never came back, and i hoped you’d never be one of them. you have blood on your hands and honey in your soul, and you lit a fire for me to keep my hands warm but all it did was burn me. they hurt you, i know that. they hurt me, i hurt myself. they took you away. promises are seldom kept but sometimes i wish your promise had never needed to happen. and i love you like ruth loved naomi in holy scripture, and that makes me wonder why we hide. it makes me wonder why i have to love you in the dark and who i am to God if i need to hide something He granted me? am i wrong for loving you over a man? am i wrong for loving you over someone they call ’sane’? am i wrong? i dont know i dont know i dont know and it’s killing me bel because even miles apart i find fire and ice inside of me just by thinking of you, unlike anything anyone else has ever”

Rey stopped, bit her lip and stared at the words before they blurred on the page, and she blinked hard to get the wetness away but it wouldn’t stop, like the endless hopelessness within her. She couldn’t keep doing this. Self-destruction was unproductive. It made her bruised wrists ache and her bloodshot eyes tired.

Unsatisfied, she folded the paper and shoved it in her bible.

 

_“And I love her under whispered oath, between my red rosary and the flowers she pulled from the dirt in the fields. I love her in the ink and paper hiding between the folds of a cliff-noted bible. She is sin and penance and her love makes me feel like flowers can grow in the sand and if she is damnation I am not worthy of heaven. I will burn in an eternal flame that will never come close to the heat of the lost lover of my earthly soul.”_

Soft. Only in dreams. She was gone from reality, transcending reality, emerging from the dreamscape of memory to haunt, to hold. Letter one day, Return To Sender. Letters the next, Return To Sender.

Return to sender, return to land of lambs and heart. Return to waiter, return to lost lover.

With a quivering lip and trembling fingers, Kira put the letters above the flame. Rey didn’t need them if she didn’t need her.

 

_“I take my vows under Venus-and-moonlight-glow, and when I fall into the water, I am free. Naked, shaking, hummingbird heart-beating free.”_

She was nineteen. A free bird that stayed put. Preacher said she’d find herself, but she fell into the river with high hopes and came out feeling the same. And Bel was Kira now, and everything hurt when she walked back in town with shades over her eyes and clothes the color of crows and punched her father square in the jaw. Rey had settled the dispute inside herself, that she’d never get over her; but she’d at least push it out of her mind.

The girls in town liked boys.

Everyone fawned over Poe fucking Dameron.

They waited with baited breath for the day he’d sweep one of them off their feet.

But they’d all damn him to hell to know he came to Rey on a sweltering afternoon with tears in his pretty-boy eyes, hating himself for liking the journalist from the capitol city, the one with the sharp eyes and ginger hair who spat on the plants outside the Governor’s office, and by liking he meant that Armitage Hux lit a fire in his loins, and by hating himself he meant not yet ready to burn in hell for it.

Rey had laughed in his face. Belly laughed while he practically sobbed at the door of her shed. And then she stopped because why would he even want to tell her something so potentially embarrassing?

“Because you and Bel,” he had cried through fat tears, his disposition one of confusion because of her confusion.

“What?”

So then she proceeded to listen to a choppy spiel of how everyone envied them because Bel of untouchable angst managed to completely enrapture Rey of sunshine and they’d never even come close to love like, defense like, soft like them. And of course it fucking hurt, mostly because everyone knew even though the girls had tried to hide it, but also because she’d spent the last six years of her life trying to wipe clean her tainted, beautiful memories of the flowers that grew in her childhood of drought.

After having been given such information, it was interesting to watch Kira order and knock back a cranberry vodka at the bar. Interesting to bus the seat next to her without a word, then to have a fierce grip on her wrist as she tried in earnest to wipe down the counter.

She could feel her knees buckling under the tension between them.

Eyes. Brown. Oh, soft. Oh, lover’s lost lust, like the soil in the fields of the deadened crop.

Illness. Heart sickness, head rot. Pretty eyes, black hair, dead inside.

Rey felt sadder than the day that she had left. Eyes on the ground, on her steel-toed boots, she tried desperately to twist out of her grip, to get rid of that _burn_ so prevalent even now, even after all these years.

“You’re afraid of me.” Bel—Kira sounded hurt.

“I—You changed.”

“Everyone changes,” she supplied.

“Not everyone.”

Rey grabbed her bussing bin and kept walking.

 

_“And when she holds me in her arms, I am home. Home at last.”_

Towns like these were dry. They were hollow and dry and lacking, but not in the way of sunshine or wheatgrass or even lonesome nights. They lacked substance, and purpose, and an overall sense of worthiness. Except for Rey. Rey deserved to get the hell out, but she couldn’t. She _wouldn’t_.

They stood on the apex of a revelation that might have never come to fruition. In the field of the dead Guardian’s farm. The farm Rey had ‘inherited’ with a stroke of luck. How could she have bared to live in such a place of rotten memories? It was different now, though. Painted, with an added porch and a much nicer barn. Kira would have thought it pleasant enough if not for the slim lost-lover preaching the gospel of pain from trembling lips, standing back from her like she was a disease.

“You march into town thinking you can step holes with your heels into _my_ dirt, get your lipstick all over my _grimy_ little farm.” Her tone was mocking, and it almost humored Kira as to how much her English accent had faded. “Thinking you can look at me and everything will be alright, everything will be like it was when I was thirteen!”

“I know.”

“It’s been six years, Bel!”

Kira winced at her birth name, but nodded. “I know.”

“You never even wrote.”

Her stomach jumped to her throat then, her defensive nature taking over. “Yes, I did. But I don’t think postal counts a shack in a junkyard as a valid address.”

She didn’t even seem to care.

“You killed me. You broke my heart,” she whispered, and _fuck_ , she was so beautiful and so sad and Kira couldn’t take her doe eyes looking up at her like that, so _hurt_.

“I know.” _I’m so sorry, baby. You were all I ever wanted._

“And I hate myself because I don’t even hate you.” Her voice broke off and she wouldn’t even look away for one second, which made it all the more unbearable. “But I don’t think I can ever forgive you.”

She raised a sharp eyebrow. “For what? Leaving when I had no choice and not coming back when I found a better life?”

“For leaving me here! You promised to come back for me. I thought—I hoped you’d take me with you.”

There was a long, drawn out pause, then Rey’s eyes became distant. “You found someone.” Her voice was flat, and Kira was so shocked that she couldn’t even find the words to kill that idea.

“I understand. You came to say goodbye,” she swallowed thickly and looked over her shoulder at the setting sun, “I just wish you would have told me to stop hoping."

“Stop it,” Kira blurted, taking one long stride towards her and grasping her shoulders, “It has _only ever_ been you. Always. I don’t know where you think I’ve been the last six years, but I certainly haven’t been shooting porn or picking up girls. For Christ’s sake, have a little faith in me.”

Rey stood with her eyes wide and glassy at this situation she had definitely not imagined in her head 600 times over. And so far, it was equal parts worse and better.

“Where there is kindness, there is love,” she half-laughed, rubbing her thumb over Rey’s shoulders, over the flesh that had plumped so beautifully after starving for so long. She was exhausted by this lifelong chase. “And sometimes kindness is fucking rough. And I love you. Still. And if you want this to be me coming back to take you away like a thief in the night, hell. Pack your bags. I just won the lawsuit over Snoke, so baby’s got money and time, and I’m sure as hell not wasting it on a lonely 'fresh start’ in fucking, I don’t know, New York. If you can stand my pathetic presence, I want to be with you.”

A pause as Rey blinked and chewed at her bottom lip, and Kira didn’t know if she was elated or ready to break down. Maybe both. Maybe she’d slap her across the face with all the fire Kira knew she was capable of, shouting at her to never come back and find a pretty California girl, or some shit like that. And fuck, Rey stood there pausing for so long that Kira began to doubt herself as the burning hot orange tones of the sunset mellowed to purple-blue, like the color she saw when Rey used to link their pinkies together during lunch, under the table like undercover operatives.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

…”What?”

“Like in the movies. When there’s a confession.”

  
“None of that was a confession, fox, and you know it. I’ve been worshipping the ground you walk on since you throat-punched Poe Dameron at church. On a Sunday.”

Rey let out a twinkling laugh, eyes nearly closed and nose scrunched up, and for a moment it felt like nothing wrong had ever happened. But then she grew more serious, yet her eyes still glowed with mischief.

“No! Y’know…” Then she leaned in and over, her expression bare and smooth and her eyes closed.

A tear slipped from Kira’s eye when Rey pressed a gentle kiss to her cheek, like a soothing balm, healing the wound torn open from lost time, stitching up the loose ends from a life of sharp edges. And she noticed soon that the tears were not all hers.

Oh, heavenly sin. Nothing— _nothing_ she had witnessed, read, heard, done. Nothing even came _close_ to the sweetness of that mouth against her skin.

Rey pulled back, eyes now open and shining with amusement.

Kira swallowed hard, not even ashamed of what she was about to do.

“Do it again,” she whispered and closed her eyes as a tear rolled down her cheek, her fingers flexing around Rey’s biceps in an attempt to pull herself together. But Rey obliged, this time with her hand coming up to cup her other cheek while she granted Kira another nectar-sweet kiss.

Oh, angel, oh, lost heaven, the light breaks through a once-eternal storm.

She was so warm, and so much everything she needed for the quickly cooling evening and her permafrost heart.

So finally she fucking did it. Kira laced her fingers into the hair at the nape of Rey’s neck, bent over to snake an arm around her waist, devoured her.

**Author's Note:**

> so i typed an entire note for the end notes and then unchecked the box, so im a grumpy star. 
> 
> thanks for stopping by! i hope you enjoyed reading this as much as i enjoyed writing it. and if you did, please leave a comment and/or kudos, as they are my lifeline and are so greatly appreciated.
> 
> much love as always
> 
> xx anya


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